Less is more

Since he met his partner Emma Thompson on the set of Sense and Sensibility, Greg Wise has been able to pick and choose his roles. As he tells Jon Henley, how else would he find time to bring biogas digesters to Africa?

He is a fortunate fellow, Greg Wise, but fortunately he knows it. "I am," he says, "very fortunate." He's dashed handsome, obviously, which is never an obstacle to an actor, and can indeed be a positive help when it comes to sweeping in on your charger, all buckskin breeches and big black cape, and rescuing poor bedraggled Kate Winslet from a spot of inclement English weather. That was the film in which he really made his name; Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, 13 years ago now.

He's good, too; you only have to watch his minutely controlled, alarmingly enigmatic performance in ITV1's upcoming drama A Place of Execution to see that. Wise plays Philip Hawkin, the suave and supercilious squire of a remote 1960s Northumberland village accused of murdering his 13-year-old stepdaughter by an ambitious young detective. It's a first-class, edge-of-your-seat thriller, co-starring a magisterial Juliet Stevenson as an obsessive present-day TV reporter reeling in an increasingly reeking 40-year-old story.

Wise shares his life with actor, writer, director and double Oscar-winner Emma Thompson, whom he famously met on the set of Sense and Sensibility ("April 30, 1994, 8.20am," she recorded in her diary. "Greg Wise turned up to ride, full of beans and looking gorgeous. Ruffled all our feathers a bit.") The couple give every appearance of being extremely happy.

Most fortunately of all, though, Wise is not hung up on acting. He's passionate about it, he talks about it thoughtfully and intelligently, but it's just one of the things he does, and he doesn't do it all that often. He also builds houses, makes documentaries (well, one so far, but it was highly acclaimed), spends as much time as he can with his daughter, and is trying to develop an individual biogas-digester for Africa. (I don't know what that is either, but he'll tell us later.)

"I love what I do very much," he insists, when we meet on the top floor of a well-known Soho arts and media club of which he is proud not to be a member. "But I don't do a lot of it. Acting is not my primary drive in life, although I'd be a very unhealthy person without it. It's just I've always been more interested in doing more than one thing. And I think I'd be a very different person - and a very different actor - were I to work more."

He first demonstrated this rare insouciance by clearing off to work with disabled kids in Nottingham straight after graduating from drama school, and then heading to Australia and going travelling. After landing his first acting job, he took off again. Years later, in 1995, after Sense and Sensibility, and with half the world's agents desperate to offer him work, he flew to LA, walked into the office of the president of Sony Pictures, and told him he really didn't want to work in America. "Then I flew back to London and worked as a builder for a year. So that was career suicide, obviously."

Wise jokes about this, but it's plain he means it. "If the point of a performance is to recreate an emotion that I believe you can only really have in real life," he says, "my fear, if I did a lot more, is that I'd start to look at parts and go, 'Ooh, that's just like my role in X.' So actually what you'd end up doing is recreating a recreation. It's incredibly important for me to explore other things, to allow myself idiot time, and to allow myself time to fail. I mean, very few of us playing a murderer will actually have killed someone. But you have to find whatever it is in your experiences that lets you into that: for me, the time in between is just as important as the time doing. I think I'd be a poorer craftsman if I did more."

Bit of a luxury, isn't it, though, to be in that position? "Oh yes. I'm very fortunate. I don't have to go out and chase the work. If I was the main source of income for the family ... I used to make quite a good living, you know. Now I earn less and less and less each year." He grins. "And I've got nothing in the pipeline at all. Terrible, isn't it. There's nothing planned at all. I am very much available for work."

Thompson, or "Em", is different. "She'll know, for example, that the first day of principal filming on Nanny McPhee will be on May the something next year. That gives a certain shape. It's not that I'm laid-back or laissez-faire; I'm constantly involved in projects. But life for me is basically crisis management. I never know what I'm doing from week to week. On the other hand, most of the most wonderful things in life are unplanned. And I've really never understood worriers."

For two people with such different approaches to their agendas, the Wise-Thompson household seems to function harmoniously. The couple have recently set up a small film company and are trying to raise finance for a project that "Em has written, and I've edited, and is a bloody good piece of work, frankly, set in the 1850s". Other than that, their professional paths rarely cross - and there's not a hint of rivalry.

"It helps, when acting couples form, if one is already doing well," says Wise (and maybe, too, if one is a bit older: at 42, Wise is seven years Thompson's junior.) "I think if both are hungry, and one starts to do a lot better than the other ... That can cause problems. But from the outset, I knew I was with someone who had already won one Oscar and was about to win another. So the question simply doesn't arise."

Born into a family of fine artists, sculptors, architects and engineers, Wise actually trained as an architect in Edinburgh for three years before switching to drama college in Glasgow, and is still deeply interested in design: "We have a cottage in Scotland and I spend time redoing old barns, creating spaces, playing around with friends, knocking walls down in their flats, that kind of thing."

He sees similarities between the two disciplines: "You're given a brief, a space, an aspect; you use your imagination and what's tangibly there to create an experience for your onlookers. It's just using a different medium." Making his 2005 documentary, on the legendary rock'n'roll TV producer Jack Good, felt like bringing "a lot of things together", he says. He'd like to do more. "I filmed it all, edited it all, and for the first time I felt like I was using all my muscles. It was holistic process. It took seven years, but I loved it."

Other things Wise loves: the couple's eight-year-old daughter Gaia (parenting "never gets easy. It's less emotionally knackering now, but more intellectually knackering"). Tindyebwa Agaba, or Tindy, the former child soldier from Rwanda the couple met at a Refugee Council party in 2003 and took under their wing soon after - his father had died of Aids, his mother and sister were listed as missing by the Red Cross - and who is now in his third year studying politics at Exeter University ("We don't really want to talk much about him if that's OK; it's hard enough for him as it is. But he's doing very well"). And biogas digesters.

"I'm very interested in poo," he says. "We don't have a very good relationship with poo, and we should have." Wise adores spending time in Africa "getting dirty" and is involved in several small development schemes there, including the successful twinning of Gaia's primary school with one in Rwanda. One project is to develop individual biogas digesters - "basically a bucket of poo and a diesel drum" - that could be used for cooking. "Most households have a few chickens and a goat or two," he says. "Did you know that if you dig a well in a village you reduce the incidence of rape and abuse, because the women and girls don't have to walk to fetch the water? It would be the same if you could set up a biogas form of cooking: they wouldn't have to go out for wood."

Just at the moment, he's rather in love with his latest production, based on a novel by Val McDermid. "It's quite rare that the feedback from almost every quarter is good," he says. "I really think A Place of Execution is good. One of the wonderful strengths is the enigmatic quality everybody has. No one gives anything away. That's very important; it's a problem today that we tend to show everything - we've stopped asking the audience to do a bit of work. It's what Ang Lee was always telling me: 'Do less, do less.' So you tone it down 'til you're practically comatose, and when you see the final product you think, 'I'm doing way too much!'"

He very much likes his character, Hawkin. Having finally "stopped, for whatever reason, being a luvvie on a horse", Wise finds it "fascinating not to play the moral agenda". "It's good to explore your darkness," he says. "It was Jung who said we have to embrace our darkness, wasn't it? You'd have to ask the missus about this, but I'm basically quite a light, happy, contented being. And to understand that that's buoyed up by darkness ... Fascinating." Greg Wise, buoyed up by darkness? Can't see it myself: he seems far too sorted. Maybe he "toned it down".

· A Place of Execution begins on September 22 on ITV1

· This article was amended on Tuesday September 16 2008. The author of A Place of Execution is Val McDermid, not McDiarmid. This has been corrected.